Page 110 of Her Dark Lies

I knew it. I knew Ana was more than she seemed. “How does it work, exactly? You get the information and you do what with it?”

“We turn the temperature up, we turn the temperature down. People respond. If they don’t...”

“So, you’re blackmailers.”

“Not exactly.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“We are information brokers, Claire. That’s all.”

“Oh, so you need to carry a gun to broker information? Or to apply pressure when the ‘temperature’ isn’t high enough. Admit it, Jack. You’re no better than Shane, you just have more money.”

“Claire.” He winces at the insult, but I can’t help it. Now that it’s sinking in, I am so furious. How dare he not tell me this sooner? How dare he not trust me until now?

“How did you know I have a gun?”

“Jack. I’m not stupid. I can see the outline under your shirt. And the ankle holster is kind of a dead giveaway.”

He takes the gun from the small of his back.

I hold out my hand. “May I?”

He frowns but racks the slide, popping the bullet from the chamber, then ejects the magazine and flips the gun around, handing it to me gingerly, butt first.

The metal is warm from his skin, the grip rough in my palm. I gesture toward the magazine. Curiosity crosses his face, but he hands it over. Brave of him, considering that once the gun is loaded, I could just pull the trigger.

Taking the magazine, I finger the open edge, feeling the hard brass of the bullets. Then I look up at Jack, meet his beautiful eyes, slam the magazine in place and rack the slide, chambering a bullet. I reverse the motions immediately, catch the bullet ejected from the slide in my hand.

All without looking away.

“Claire?”

I sigh and turn the weapon back over to him.

“Okay, Jack. You were honest with me. Now it’s my turn to be honest with you.”

It was Shane, of course. He forced me into it. I didn’t want to have anything to do with his drug business, except to take them and disappear from the pain of my life for a while. But nothing comes free, does it?

He used me as a runner. Carrying drugs and money came with bona fide danger. When one of his less savory friends roughed me up one night, stealing both the stash and the cash, he decided I needed to carry a gun to ward off any more robberies.

This was before things turned south, before the night he robbed the Mapco and I killed my father. This was back when he was small-time, before he went full on gangster badass working for MS-13.

I was a terrible shot, but I loved the heft of the weapon he gave me. It made me feel strong, invincible. If I couldn’t shoot someone with it, I could clock them across the nose, and that would work, too.

But the rules were the rules, and he wouldn’t let me carry it until I knew how to use it. He made me practice. Over and over and over, until I could wake from a dead sleep and have a bullet chambered in seconds flat.

I was his backup, he used to say. He sweet little backup plan. The one no one would ever see coming. Until I became his biggest liability.

“You asked me if Shane ever hurt me. Of course he did. If I smiled wrong, he’d smack me. If I lost the stash, he’d kick me. If I upset him in any way...well, you get the idea.”

“You got caught, though. Eventually.”

“Yes. He had me driving the night he robbed the Mapco. He had a gun on me, there were drugs in his pocket, and more in the trunk. But I was a juvenile, and when we got pulled over, he said, ‘Follow my lead.’

“The cops thought I’d been taken hostage. And that was the story we stuck with. Even when I sat across from him in the courtroom, testifying, looking him in the eye, he nodded and smirked at me to keep me going with the lie. So, I did. I told them he grabbed me from the party, forced me into the car, and they believed it.”

“He loved you.”